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Book/DVD list for your April 15 Tea Party

The local tea party in Lancaster PA seems to have been organized by 2 fine ladies who, on the tea party web site, also recommend a book list for invitees. Good for them. Much of the list, apparently originating with Ron Paul, is made up of the True Liberals, or libertarians, like Ludwig van Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and many others.

I emailed these ladies and thanked them for doing this and then said there were a few other books that Americans ought to read.

I wrote:

For today’s world, the most important information – most of which your school and/or college probably made sure you missed – is the story of the socialist dictators of the 20th century.

An invaluable contribution to your list would be “Harvest of Sorrow” by Robert Conquest, describing the slaughter of millions of Ukrainian farmers, “Son of the Revolution” by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro, an eye-witness account of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the 3 disk DVD set China, a Century of Revolution, directed by Sue Williams (one of the co-producers was Karma Hinton, my first Chinese teacher). You will immediately see the unmistakable similarity between the Red Guard and ACORN.

Further DVDs: Repentance, a top-notch surrealistic Russian film (RU title: Pokayanie) about a Stalin like figure, Est-Oueste (East-West), an excellent film about a French family that visits the Soviet Union in the early post-WW II years and is trapped there. The Chinese film To Live is also an artistic masterpiece but at the same time, a realistic portrayal of the tragedy of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.

Others: A somewhat tedious but trail blazing book “The Black Book of Communism” was written by a group of French communists under Stéphane Courtois who decided to come clean about the death toll of the 20th century, namely, almost 100 million innocents slaughtered throughout the world in the name of “social justice.”

Further, the Russian film Nest of Noblefolk (RU: Dvorjanskoe Gnezdo), an adaptation of the Turgenev story, shows the remarkable similarity between the mid 1800s and our 60s, with the elite classes talking about the same ideas that threw our society into moral and social turmoil. Shot in the Russian countryside, it is a cinema buff’s delight, with gorgeous photography, period-correctness in all aspects, soulful Russian gypsy music, a gripping love story with 2 intertwined love triangles and a surprise ending.

Note, however, that Turgenev’s best description of the early revolutionaries is given in his novel “Fathers and Sons,” which reflects the ideas that we considered revolutionary in our 1960s. In reality, we were a century later than the Russians in introducing ordered chaos, which is why freedom survived so long here. Nothing stands in the way of totalitarianism now – except you. And you know what? I believe in you.